Penny Thoughts is supposed
to be a briefer forum in which I can comment more succinctly about the movies I
watch at home. In order to achieve this with my thoughts on the international
espionage thriller “Killer Elite”, I’m going to have to confine my comments to
the opening action sequence. In fact, I think I can make my point with just one
detail of that scene.

We meet a team of
mercenaries on the job. They are lead by Jason Statham and Robert De Niro, but
there are two other members of the team. Dominic Purcell only functions as a
lookout in this scene. He tells the rest of the team when their job is going
down. The other merc is Aden Young, playing the team’s explosives expert. It’s
an assassination job. There is a motorcade lead by motorcycles followed by two
limos. The target is in the second limo. The powdermonkey waits for the cycles
to pass and ignites the first limo. This cuts the second limo off from the
motorcycle protection so Statham and De Niro can come in with guns and finish
the job. So I ask, why not just blow up the second limo and be done with it?

One might argue that the
smart way may not be as exciting as what they did in the movie. I contend that
the mercenaries could do their job the smart way and the screenwriters could
still make it interesting and exciting. It’s possible that not everyone in the
limo would die in the explosion and the Statham and De Niro characters would
still have to go in for close range execution.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to write the scene in a smarter way and
still allow for high suspense. There’s a lack of imagination here that
permeates the entire film. The filmmakers settle for clichés and plot holes in
a story based on real events that could’ve been a good action movie. I don’t
blame the actors. They do their jobs, but the script needed another rewrite
with someone more used to adapting true stories rather than Hollywood action clichés.

No comments:

Followers

Star Rating Scale

About Me

Andrew D. WellsAndrew is a professionally trained actor and stage director. He was a reporter for the daily newspaper The Marshall Democrat-News. He has been critiquing film since Mr. Lucas released the first of his "Star Wars" prequels in 1999. His reviews can also be seen atMarshall Democrat-News